Don't quit your day job

Summary:

If female fear and self-doubt were ever eradicated, the publishing industry would collapse.

Another day, another book or magazine article about how women can have better orgasms, more money, smarter kids; mix job and family, spirituality and ambition; be a feminist and a stripper. But no matter the issue, the premise is pretty much the same: we're doing something wrong.

Leslie Bennetts's The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? is a great rejoinder to Caitlin Flanagan's To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.

Bennetts's book captures so much so well – the perils of dumping your career to stay home with your kids; the joy of having work you love and excel at – that it took me a few days to figure out what bothered me.

The problem is the so-called mistake at the heart of the book. Women are constantly being warned about the way we keep bollixing this whole love, work and family thing.

But are we? And who's we?

Comment:

"Life and work are hard; some women don't want to be corporate cogs, and that's admirable; some can't find careers that let them balance work and family, and that's lamentable; and some just don't want to do the hard work of finding a career they love and getting good at it, and they use kids as an excuse, which is deplorable." This is one comment from Joan Walsh that says it all.